Suzanne B. Goldberg is a leading national expert in sexuality and gender law. Goldberg is Clinical Law Professor and Director of the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she also teaches civil procedure and seminars in lawyering and social change.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Professor Goldberg was a member of the faculty and director of the Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic of Rutgers School of Law-Newark. While there, she served for many years on the state supreme court’s civil practice committee.
During the 1990s, Professor Goldberg was a senior attorney with Lambda Legal, an organization specializing in protecting the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender (LGBT) individuals, and people with HIV/AIDS. At Lambda, she worked extensively on employment, immigration, and family law matters, as well as on challenges to numerous antigay amendments and sodomy laws. Her cases include two that eventually became cornerstone gay rights victories before the US Supreme Court – Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated Texas’ sodomy law, and Romer v. Evans, which struck down an anti-gay Colorado constitutional amendment. Professor Goldberg has also been a leader in seeking immigration and asylum rights for LBGT individuals and people with HIV/AIDS. In the early 1990s, she co-founded Immigration Equality (formerly known as the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force) and later chaired the board of directors, sheparding the organization into a leading role on all matters related to sexual orientation, HIV, and immigration.
Professor Goldberg’s scholarship, which focuses on procedural and substantive barriers to equality, has won numerous awards. Her 2004 article,
Morals-Based Justifications for Lawmaking: Before and After Lawrence v. Texas, won the Dukeminier Award from the Williams Institute of UCLA Law School, as did her 2006 article,
Constitutional Tipping Points: Civil Rights, Social Change, and Fact-Based Adjudication. A new article,
Discrimination by Comparison, will be published in 2011 in the Yale Law Journal.
Her co-authored book,
Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial, has been hailed for capturing the cultural, political and legal context of the gay rights movement in the 1990s through the lens of the
Romer v. Evans trial. Copies of Professor Goldberg’s recent scholarship can be found on her Columbia Law School
faculty web page.
Professor Goldberg is a frequent commentator and analyst for news media on sexuality and gender law, and on discrimination law and litigation issues. Her commentary has been featured on 20/20 and on CNN and the national networks as well as on radio and news outlets around the world.
Professor Goldberg graduated with honors from Brown University in 1985, and then was a Fulbright Fellow at the National University of Singapore. Following her graduation with honors from Harvard Law School in 1990, she clerked for Justice Marie Garibaldi of the New Jersey Supreme Court. In May 2009, Goldberg received the Columbia Law School Willis L.M. Reese Award for Excellence in Teaching. Professor Goldberg has also been honored to receive the Columbia Law School Public Interest Professor of the Year Award, the M. Ashley Dickerson Award from the National Association of Women Lawyers, the Annual Honor from the LGBT Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as other recognition for her work in sexuality and gender law.